The effect of central bank transparency on inflation persistence

In this paper, we examine the effect of central bank transparency on inflation persistence, using panel data analysis. The existing literature has shown a significant impact of central bank transparency on macroeconomic variables, such as inflation, but not many efforts have been made about its effect on inflation persistence. We use yearly data for 14 countries and the Eurozone (ECB). We find that monetary policy transparency has a negative statistically significant impact on inflation persistence, while controlling also for important variables such as GDP growth, interest rates, economic openness and unit labour cost.

A Text Mining Analysis of Central Bank Monetary Policy Communication in Nigeria

This paper employs text-mining techniques to analyse the communication strategy of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) during the period 2004-2019. Since the policy communique released after each meeting of the CBN’s monetary policy committee (MPC) represents an important tool of central bank communication, we construct a corpus based on 87 policy communiques with a total of 123, 353 words. Having processed the textual data into a form suitable for analysis, we examined the readability, sentiments, and topics of the policy documents. While the CBN’s communication has increased substantially over the years, implying increased monetary policy transparency; the computed Coleman and Liau readability index shows that the word and sentence structures of the policy communiques have become more complex, thus reducing its readability. In terms of monetary policy sentiments, we find an average net score of -10.5 per cent, reflecting the level of policy uncertainties faced by the MPC over the sample period. In addition, our results indicate that the topics driving the linguistic contents of the communiques were influenced by the Bank’s policy objectives as well as the nature of shocks hitting the economy per period.

Central Bank Communication and Monetary Policy Predictability under Uncertain Economic Conditions

Modern central banks increasingly value monetary policy transparency, and attempt to build credibility by communicating their decisions to the public. This paper studies whether the communication of central banks can be used to explain upcoming changes in their most important monetary policy instrument, the short-term refinancing rate, and whether the public can trust central bank communication during times of financial crisis. This is done by constructing an indicator to measure the predictability of monetary policy by calculating the median of the policy makers’ official comments. The performance of this indicator is studied with ordered probit methods. The results show that predictability was reached relatively well at central bank level during the financial crisis despite the rapid growth of economic uncertainty, and that communication can be a useful tool for central banks during uncertain times.

Transparency of Monetary Policy in the Postcrisis World

This chapter analyzes whether and to what extent central banks have continued to be more transparent in their conduct of monetary policy in the postcrisis period. It presents a monetary policy transparency index, that measures the degree of information disclosure about various aspects of the policymaking process for 112 central banks from 1998 until 2015. Compared to previous research, the index has been updated, revised and refined to better capture developments since the global financial crisis, with and explicit focus on monetary policy, more emphasis on the timely disclosure of information, and greater granularity, including for forward guidance. The development and challenges of increasing monetary policy transparency are further analyzed in case studies of the European Central Bank, the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, which illustrate how these prominent central banks have deployed greater transparency as a policy tool in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

The impact of monetary policy transparency on inflation: the case of Ukraine

This study presents empirical evidence on the impact of monetary policy transparency on inflation. A lot of studies analyzed how monetary policy transparency is entangled with inflation level from a theoretical point of view and came to contradictory results (some studies argued that transparency leads to lower inflation, others concluded that transparency results in higher prices). But this study is different from prior studies. Firstly, it looks at investigated issue empirically. Secondly, it considers for other causes of inflation and employs a panel data set on central bank transparency. Thirdly this paper investigates the issue associated with transparency in Ukraine. The authors find that transparency significantly reduces inflation rates in developed countries, but it is positively associated with inflation in Ukraine. Keywords: central bank, monetary policy transparency, information disclosure, inflation. JEL Classification: E52, E58, E59